Systems for analyzing the motion of people are becoming increasingly widespread in the biomedical sector, notably for analyzing a person's physical activity.
The detection of a person's walking activity is an item of information which makes it possible, for example, to estimate a person's energy expenditure, to evaluate a person's level of sedentariness, or to estimate the quality or the loss of functional capacity after a surgical intervention or a medicinal treatment.
The document “Stair climbing detection during daily physical activity using a miniature gyroscope” by Brian Coley, Bijan Najafi, Anisoara Paraschiv_Ionescu, and Kamiar Aminian, published in Gait and Posture in 2005, pertains to the detection of stair climbing and descent with the aid of a gyroscope. For this purpose, the system estimates the various characteristic instants of a walking cycle.